I gave him a chicken-and-avocado on brown but it didn’t annoy him as much as I hoped it would; he grunted a hello and flicked his big cropped head and kept moving and I fell into line with him and we did a turn or two around the park, which was giving as good an account of spring as it could muster, given the weather. The horse-chestnut trees were coming into leaf; the sycamore and ash were still bare. The day had brightened, with veins of watery blue seaming the dirty sky, but a salt east wind blew cold off the bay; no one we passed was walking for pleasure.
I was ready to press Dave about the Fogarty case, but the first thing he said brought me to a juddering halt.
“See our old friend Dessie Delaney’s brother Paul got hit.”
“He what? I just saw him last night in Tolka Park. The shooter aimed over their heads.”
“The shooter this morning didn’t miss. One in the face through the window of his red Mazda. Another three in the head to make sure, and then off on the back of a waiting motorbike.”
I was facing away from Dave when he told me, and grateful for it; the news took me aback, and it would have shown in my face. Whatever I thought Paul Delaney was into, I hadn’t expected this. Whatever he’d done wrong, he didn’t deserve to die. Worse still, part of me couldn’t help feeling it was my fault.
“Then there’s the two lads stabbed in the alley. On top of Delaney, that’s got three gangland murders on the one o’clock news. Everyone’s jumping up and down, the Minister for Justice, opposition spokesmen, the Garda Commissioner saying we’re doing all we can. Just as well my cases all stretch back twenty-odd years or so, and I can spend my day jaunting in the park with entrepreneurs the like of you.”
“Fuck sake, Paul Delaney.”
“Did you know him well, Ed?”
“Yeah, sure Dessie called me up a couple of days ago, out of the blue. Said he was worried about Paul, heard he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd, drugs, so on. Asked me to keep an eye on him, see what the story was.”
“End of story now,” Dave said grimly. “Don’t know what this fucking town is coming to. Kids stabbing Polish lads in the head with screwdrivers, young fellas getting knifed to death over fifty-euro debts, or worse, over looking sideways at the wrong man. The whole place is falling a-fucking-part, I’m not codding you now.”
“Sure I know,” I said. “What was the deal with the other two boys, Beresford Place, was it?”
“In the lane there. Yeah. Ah, either they were part of Jack Cullen’s setup, or they weren’t, and either way they fell foul of him, or Lamp Comerford, or one of the excuses for human beings he surrounds himself with. Was Paul Delaney caught up with Cullen?”
“I don’t know. There was talk he was; he said he wasn’t. I’d seen him twice, he was a very plausible lad, a nice left foot, should have done well for himself. But he grew up ’round it all—”
“You don’t have to join in, not everyone does. It’s not some pothole people fall into—”
“I’m not saying it is, and I’m not making excuses for him. More an explanation. It’s what he said to me: he knew Cullen, he couldn’t ignore him, he knew all Cullen’s people. Does that make him guilty?”
Dave canted his chin in the way he had, to indicate he was conceding the point while still on some level dissenting from it.
“How’s Dessie anyhow?”
“Well, I think he was doing grand out there in Greece. Not anymore.”
We walked in silence for a while, Dave working away at his sandwich. I had lost my appetite. I was working through the what-ifs, torturing myself with what I had done, and what I had failed to do. I couldn’t have been expected to provide twenty-four-hour surveillance for Paul Delaney, but that didn’t make his murder any easier to accept, or me any less determined to find his killer. At one point, Dave lifted his head from his sandwich and stared balefully at me, but he kept his counsel. When we got back to Oscar, Dave stopped and looked at his watch.
“All right, look, the Fogarty case. Stay away, don’t get involved. Give her back her money. I assume it’s Anne, is it? And by the look in your eyes, I can see she made an impression. You’ll never change when it comes to skirt, will you?”
“What is this, Dave, are you warning me off, same as you warned Anne Fogarty off?”
Dave looked over his shoulder, as if Oscar Wilde was eavesdropping, then brought his big pan close to mine.
“One of the suspects Anne Fogarty claims are in the frame for her father’s murder was in the IRA. One of them is a very respectable businessman who had a few tax issues. One of them is George Halligan, that CAB has been trying to lay a glove on and failing for twelve years. My team are directed to avoid anything with a whiff of paramilitary involvement. So that rules Jack Cullen out. And in any case, what he did back then, before the cease-fire, there’s no comeback now: that’s all water under the bridge.”
“What about Bobby Doyle? Has he any history of republican involvement?”
“Not that I know of. He’s a Nordie, and a Sinn Féin donor, but I think he got into that in the States, you know, all that Irish-American shite.”
“I thought there was a cross-border unit that were reinvestigating unsolved cases from the Troubles.”
“There is, and maybe they’d take an interest, if you can make the link with Cullen. But they probably have cases a lot higher in priority than a dead tax collector in Sandymount. And anyway, there’s enough there, in my opinion, to sustain the position that even if Steve Owen’s conviction was found to be unsafe, he still looks favorite. Did Anne Fogarty not tell you I told her that?”
“She said you’d just stonewalled her on the phone, kept repeating that the Guards no longer considered the case to be ‘live.’”
Dave raised his eyebrows and shook his great head, pantomiming surprise.
“Is that what she said? And there was I thinking, for once, Ed had a nice girl to deal with, whatever about the case.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean I met Anne Fogarty, I took her for coffee, I talked through the reasons we wouldn’t revisit her father’s case. I took her to the Merrion Hotel, Ed.”
“Fuck’s sake, Dave. I hope Carmel doesn’t find out.”
“Stop. I can hear her now. You never take me to the Merrion Hotel. But yeah, I did, and do you know why? Because I felt sorry for the child. And now she’s telling you I’m the bad guy?”
I shrugged, as if a client, or a woman, lying to me wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t, but I had thought this one would be different.
“Do you actually think Steve Owen is still the killer, or does it just make life easier for you?”
Dave exhaled heavily, his eyes flaring red, as if the considerable trial on his patience and good nature I presented was beginning to tell.
“Have you looked at the case in any detail? The investigating officer is retired now, but he’ll talk to you if I ask him to. I’ve had dealings with him a couple of times since I started in SCR, and I’ve found him straight as a die. Noel Sweeney is his name. And for what it’s worth, he’s very clear in his mind that it was a crime of passion, with Owen responsible, and the mother every bit as guilty.”
“But the appeal judge—”
“Ah, fuck away off with the appeal judge, who d’you think you are, some earnest shite from the Irish Times? Appeal judges can be as wrong as cops you know, as pigheaded and tendentious and perverse.”
“What about George Halligan? He never had any Provo connections, did he?”
Dave worked out of Seafield throughout the eighties and nineties, home turf for the Halligan crime family.
“Not that I know of. And I’d’ve heard. Nah, we were watching a few lads all right, but the Halligans always had…other priorities.”
“Do you reckon him for the murder? He was what, in his mid-twenties then?”
“Just getting going in a serious way. And he made money quickly, although nothing like the amounts the other boys had racked up. I don’t get why Fogarty targeted
George, to be honest, he wasn’t in that league. And I don’t think the Halligans were into hits that early. They were savages, but they would have threatened Fogarty, or beaten him up, not taken him out. Podge maybe, but Podge wasn’t off the leash to that extent back then. And George was always very cautious when it came to anything white-collar, respectful almost, sure that was his whole vision of himself, as a legitimate businessman. But listen, if you can find some evidence to pin it on George Halligan, go ahead. You’d want to move fast though.”
“Why is that?”
“I thought you’d have heard. Lung cancer. Nothing can be done, so the story goes. Out there in St. Bonaventure’s. He’s got three months to live.”
AS SOON AS I got home I read what little there was to read on the Internet about Paul Delaney’s murder. They’d been waiting for him in the car park beneath his apartment block on Parnell Street. Passersby heard the shots, and saw the motorcycle tearing off afterward. Delaney was described as a promising footballer who was not “known to Gardaí.” Quite a professional hit for somebody with no criminal connections.
The Beresford Lane victims had been named as Simon Devlin, twenty, and Dean Cummins, eighteen. I listened online to a replay of the RTE News at One Dave had mentioned, which covered all three murders and the Tolka Park gunman, and which was full of law and order breaking down and people not being safe on the streets and the scourge of drug crime and how twenty years ago disputes that were solved with fists and boots were now being settled with guns and knives. It was depressing stuff, made all the more so by the fact that the whole thing would have a press life of a week at most, reach a crescendo in the Sunday newspapers and then be swiftly replaced by the next outrage. As I was wondering whether the Guards would have notified Dessie Delaney of his brother’s killing by now, or whether that duty fell to me, the phone rang. The North Inner City grapevine had been burning up the wires to Greece. Dessie sounded as if he’d passed through shock and grief and had moved into cold rage, which was where he proposed to stay.
“What did you find out, Ed?”
“Very little, Dessie, I only had two days. I’m sorry—”
“Don’t very little me, and don’t sorry me either: I want to know what you barely know yet, what you’re not admitting to yourself, what you wanted more facts to back up but won’t get now he’s dead. And I’m fucking paying you, all right man, for the days you done and however many more it takes, until we find the fucks who done this. Or do we have to look beyond Cullen?”
Great. Two jobs at the same time. That always works.
“All right then. From what I heard, if Paul was involved in anything dirty, he would have been working for Cullen. So this would be a blow against Cullen’s authority. I was at Tolka last night when the gunman opened up. That was for show, Dessie, and I don’t know what it meant, except that there was no one targeted, the rounds went into the sky and were intended to. Now, when Barry Jordan, Shels captain, saw me, and made the connection with you, he looked at Paul like there was something wrong. And after the shots, all the Shelbourne players gathered in a huddle. I told Paul he should join them, and I could see he wanted to, but instead, he ran off to the dressing room on his own. There were very definitely rumors, and his teammates were evidently aware of them.
“I spoke to Ray Moran at the Viscount, pushed him on dissent in the ranks, on what Lamp Comerford was up to, didn’t get anywhere. Ten minutes after I left the Viscount, two lads jumped me with a knife. I took them both out but left them breathing. This morning they were found with their throats cut. I don’t know yet if that was about Paul, or about me, Dessie. There’s a chance my prints are on the knife.
“Paul said he’d been summoned to Jack Cullen’s table one night after he’d scored a hat trick, that Cullen had given him a lift home, that that’s where all the rumors started.”
“What do you think, Ed?”
“Well, on the other side, eighteen years old he was living in an apartment block on Parnell Street—”
“Me and Liam paid his rent, or most of it anyway.”
“Is that so? All right then. There’s also, he was driving a little red Mazda coupe that I don’t see how he could afford on what Shels are paying him.”
“What? An MX-5 1.8i? The roadster?” Dessie’s voice was incredulous. I’d forgotten he was a total petrolhead. Dessie the Driver. “The fuck did he get that?”
“He said his girlfriend’s father had a Mazda dealership, and he’s a major Shels fan, let him drive it for nothing.”
There was a long silence on the phone. I could hear laughter in the background, and the clink of glasses, and strains of the kind of somber-saccharine ballad you heard only in European holiday resorts. Then Dessie cleared his throat.
“That sounds like shite, Ed, to be honest with you.”
“Do you know the girl in question?”
“The last girlfriend we knew about, they broke up over Christmas. He might have a new one, but if he does, it’s a bit soon for her da to be giving him cars. I don’t like the sound of that at all.”
“Well. I can look into it. But there’s a limit to what I can do for the time being. It’s a Garda investigation now.”
“Yeah, but what chance is there they’re gonna come up with anything? I mean, how many of these have they solved? It was a pro hit, sounds like: fucking none of them, know I mean? So whatever you can whittle out man, it’s better than waiting for them to come up with fuck all.”
“All right. Thing is though, Dessie, if it was a pro hit…”
“Yeah. Well. That’s where we need a closer look at Jack Cullen’s organization and his difficulties, isn’t it?”
“Are you coming back, Dessie?”
“Of course I’m coming back, what do you think?”
“I think…I’ll be blunt with you Dessie, I’m not doing intelligence gathering so that you can pull some gangland madman you used to know out of the fire and launch a hit on Jack Cullen or Lamp Comerford or whoever we might find is connected to Paulo’s death. There’s a limit to how far I’m prepared to go, and I’m nudging up against it now.”
‘Is this a warning, Ed? I mean, these fuckers just killed my brother.”
“And I’m very sorry, Dessie, and I want his killers badly: he died on my watch, and even if there was nothing I could have done, I can’t have that. But if he was dealing drugs for them, for any of them, he’s no longer an innocent bystander. And by that, I don’t mean he deserved to die. I mean, I’m not going to play a part in avenging his death, unless it means finding evidence against his killers that can be used in court. Do you understand?”
I heard the ballad music again, with a grand underlay of gloopy strings this time; it punctuated the conversation with a melodramatic emphasis it hardly needed; finally, Dessie spoke up.
“That’s sound, Ed. Sorry if I was getting carried away, it’s just…the day that’s in it, know I mean? You’ll do what you can, yeah?”
I’d do what I could. And I’d tell Dessie what I found out, in spite of all my grand talk. And if someone died because of it, well, maybe that was just the way it had to be: to avenge his brother, and to expiate my guilt, and to protect my reputation too. I wasn’t hired, or even asked, to be Paul Delaney’s bodyguard; no one warned me that he was in danger. But like I said to Dessie: he died on my watch, and whether it was my fault or not, it was down to me to make it right.
CHAPTER 7
As well as serving as an impersonal space in which to meet clients, an office is a great place to think. Otherwise, I lived in my car, on the move, depending on momentum to yield results, postponing as long as possible the moment I had to go home. Often that worked. But just as often, I got caught up in events over which I had no control, and the case threatened to explode in my face, and sometimes did. Or at least, that was what I thought as I worked my way through the press cuttings and court transcripts in the Brian Fogarty file Anne had brought me, trying to weigh the likely guilt or otherwise of the three major suspec
ts.
From what Dave said, and from what I knew about him, George Halligan didn’t seem like a runner, although he could never be ruled out or underestimated. The unexplained assets and property he had back in ’91 amounted to a couple of hundred grand in property—two houses and two apartments dotted around the southside. Two hundred grand wasn’t small change back then but it was comparatively little, certainly if you were going to compare with Jack Cullen, who, in the Dublin expression, would have stabbed you for looking at him, and would have had no qualms about having a pesky tax inspector beaten to death, or about doing the job himself. According to Fogarty’s letter, Cullen in 1991 had a villa in Marbella, three town houses in Dundalk and half a dozen three-and four-story rental properties around the North Inner City, all the while signing on for fifty-two pounds forty a week in unemployment benefit payments.
Fogarty’s reckoning of Bobby Doyle’s assets was even more impressive: Doyle had fourteen substantial Georgian and Victorian houses on the northside of Dublin and a large, detached residence on what estate agents could not resist calling tree-lined Clyde Road in Dublin 4, among foreign diplomats and the old rich. Very little was known about Doyle back then; he had subsequently become one of the biggest property developers in the state, with shopping centers and housing estates to his credit.
Anne Fogarty had included plenty of clippings from the last ten years, including a full two-page profile from a series about property developers in the Irish Times, where he featured alongside the other names likely to be seen gracing the sides of the cranes that still hovered above the city. There may have been talk of economic downturn, and even recession, but the big builders and developers had stored up enough fat to weather whatever the market threw at them and come up trumps. Doyle himself kept a very low profile. He didn’t race horses or pilot helicopters or boats or any of the stuff men in his position liked to do; indeed, a recurring theme of all the newspaper profiles was how little was known about how he did spend his time: committed family man was the consensus, with at least three children of school-going age being mentioned.
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